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This Week in Anime
Ladies Hentai Gets Short-Shafted

by Monique Thomas & Michelle Liu,

New TWIA initiate Nicky joins the crew but her first assignment is delving into the obscure reaches of Coolmic, a mobile manga service focusing on translating all that lady-targeted smut that's adapted into an anime each season. How exactly does The Titan's Bride, Fire in his Fingertips, and A Lustful Night Mingling with a Priest play out? Well...this content certainly isn't safe for YouTube.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

@Lossthief @Liuwdere @NickyEnchilada @vestenet


Micchy
Hey Nicky! Welcome to the team here at This Week in Anime, where we regularly shoot the shit about whatever new anime crosses our radar. It's great to have another person join in on the fun of picking apart the seasonal hits and hidden gems. Unfortunately for you, we've all got to pay our Bad Show Tax at some point, and for you that means we're throwing you in the deep end of dirt-cheap crappy ladyporn. Enjoy!
Nicky
Thanks, Micchy! I'm extremely grateful for everyone for letting me be here today. It's not quite what I expected for my first rodeo but I guess all those years spent with fanfic and other kinds of smut have got to pay off for something now? Time to discard any and all pretenses of respectability because in a way this garbage can makes me feel right at home!
You joined at a really good time! So, if you've been paying much attention to the site lately, I'm sure you've heard of this little BL anime called The Titan's Bride. It's being distributed internationally by Coolmic, the latest in Cool Japan ventures of questionable market-savviness. Thankfully, the service has been putting it up on YouTube in lightly edited form so anybody interested can have a taste before committing to dropping several bucks on five minutes of smut.

Sorry, did I say lightly edited? I meant cut in a way that reminds me of watching anime in three parts on YouTube back in the day of undiscerning content filters.
There's definitely a lot of questionable choices being made when they feel the need to blast an alarm into my earphones four times in a span of about twenty seconds because I haven't forked over any horny dollars to watch some drawings move. The shorts have been edited for broadcast to begin with and having more additional edits leaves a little TOO much to be desired in more than just sexiness, iykwim?
Which makes me question the point of putting it all on YouTube in the first place! The TV version has the naughty bits covered up to comply with broadcast regulations, but it still leaves enough visible/audible that the audience can fill in the gaps with their imagination and then shell out for the uncensored Blu-ray version if they still crave the full experience. YouTube, on the other hand, is fairly stringent about any sexual content at all, so what we're left with is the setup to a porno and none of the payoff. There's teasing, and then there's a chopped up "preview" that blueballs the viewer so often it starts feeling like a joke. Points for having different censor alarms for every show, though: a buzzer for the sexy fireman, a mokugyo for the sexy priest, and a home screen voice line for the fantasy gacha game giant with a broken neck.
Look, I can't bask in the hilarity of having a sacred instrument being used as a cash grift if they're gonna cover up stuff like Alexander The Great playing some b-ball. GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT!
They made that anime already and it's called Fate/Zero.
Waver Velvet self-insert historical fanfiction aside. Our main character of The Titan's Bride is a regular high-school student, Kōichi Mizuki, who one in one day goes from slamming some dunks on the basketball court to getting slammed into another world and into the sheets a royal giant, Caius Lao Vistaille, ready to bed his “Bride”-to-be This all happens in the span of 2 minutes.
In any case he's a generic fantasy prince with an enormous schlong. I mean I assume his ding-dong is huge, but it's hard to tell even in the uncensored cut. Which brings me to the more important issue: at five minutes a pop, there's almost no way Titan's Bride or A Lustful Night Mingling with a Priest is going to have any more than the barest outline of a story; the point of these things is the sexytimes for an audience of women who don't have a huge selection of animated porn available to them. I'm not even going to pretend to judge them on their narrative merits; we all know that's not the draw here. It really comes down to whether the porn is any good or not, and that's a matter of taste.
I'm gonna say 5 minutes is pretty generous for most of these. Even without the edits it seems like some of these have just been parred down in order to get to the good bits before having them removed. Near the end of Fire in his Fingertips the episode flat out tells you that the events have been "re-arranged" as to not confuse you when the whole thing just jumps to the climax of the story. Screw Tension! Literally!
You might wonder if Fire in his Fingertips is called such because the firefighter love interest is good at playing with his lover's ladybits. You'd be wrong, of course. The only thing this guy's good at is being kind of a creep.
The story for most of these are pretty boilerplate Josei/Teens' Love or Boy's Love genre conventions with perhaps one or two gimmicks to try and get the blood pumping but that also includes the protagonists just kind of bending over to guys that aren't exactly the most cordial. It's par for the course but if you're looking for something more subversive you're more likely to be disappointed.
Not that something you watch to get off to has to be subversive or even thoughtful! But it's pretty disappointing that in a market where already women have so little a share, almost all of the stuff that gets animated appeals to the same one or two kinks. Cool that the women out there who are into dominant fictional guys can fill a theater for a screening of softcore porn, but I can't help but feel that any other tastes are underserved. You might attribute that homogeneity to a lack of demand for alternatives, but I wonder how much of that demand is manufactured/perpetuated by the marketing itself.
Yeah, the notions around consent and agency in porn are, to say, quite sticky.
Most of this is going to come down to preference, but some of this stuff is edited in such a way where I can't even tell what parts of it are consensual or not. Even if I was watching this for non-review purposes, I would be pretty unsure of paying money on it unless I knew it fit my tastes.
Pretty much. You'd be paying for third-rate softcore where you don't know what to expect, since unlike actual porno these things don't have titles like "Getting Rawed By My Childhood Friend Who's Now A Priest." Some of the titles come close to being that descriptive! But if you want to pay for smut you know you'd like you may as well throw a few bucks to your Patreon artist of choice. I can't say that the experience of watching these shorts - both edited and not - is entirely boring though. For instance, there's that part where the priest tries to NTR his own brother.
I will also say that they also don't always look ugly either. There's definitely something odd and amusing about seeing some heavy Revolutionary Girl Utena imagery getting cribbed for your fantasy porno.
Yeah, I'll give 'em this much - of all the shorts to give a marketing push, Coolmic at least picked the least ugly one.
Most of it just seems to be a bit too generic ikemen beefcake for me.

Although, I can see the priest being a bit appetizing if you are exclusively into eggs.
I've seen enough sexy One-Punch Man fanart for a lifetime, thank you very much.
Actually, I was thinking about Solas from Dragon Age.
Now that's one hardboiled egg! Unlike the one in the priest anime whose face seems to melt when it comes in contact with human flesh.

At the end of the day, while I respect that Coolmic's pushing smuttier titles intended for audiences besides the usual T&A-liking dudes, I can't recommend the shows themselves when they look terrible and are hardly even sexy. Props for trying, but nah.
It seems difficult to say when “porn for women” seems to be so desolate, some thirsty folk might be looking for some sort of oasis, but personally these left me feelin' pretty dry. I think most people are better off skipping these shorts and looking into something else. Or, if anything at all seemed appealing to you, dive straight into the source material given it's not barred by some ear-buzzing paywall. God, I'm gonna be hearing that mokugyo in my nightmares, I know it.
Let the wooden fish sound into your heart, Nicky. This is only the beginning.
I'll be looking forward to it. /sarcasm

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